I’m going to try to write about yesterday.  It breaks my decision to not write about my personal drama, but I really need to write this out, for my own sanity.   First, my horoscope (I’m an Aries) for today said the following:

The Moon understands Mars well today, so give yourself a chance to follow wherever your heart leads. Emotions are there to be recognized and finally worked on, and you’ll feel that there are many opportunities opening in front of you when you listen to your inner senses.

For as long as your boundaries for the outer world are clearly set you have no reason to worry about your situation. There is just enough passion inside you to always light the way and just enough strength to stand against intruders.

Very appropo.   I spent the day recognizing a multitude of emotions on a multitude of things yesterday.  In a 12 hour period my life was picked up, turned upside down, and everything shaken on to the ground. I have spent the time since then, trying to pick up the pieces I need to keep, and putting them back into some semblance of recognizable order. Some of them, I left on the ground, the ones that did not serve me anything but ugliness and someone’s chaotic egoic self-serving drama.

Yesterday morning I was up early because I had the Rock-A-Thon fundraiser I was supposed to be at at 7, and it was about a half hour away. (I never made it, I texted them and explained in a broad way.) I got up, went in the bathroom, came back out got my phone and saw a missed call and voice mail asking me to call her from my bff in CT. That’s not ever a good thing at 6 AM. I called her right back.

She had the police at her house. They wanted to talk to me.

Apparently, my ex had a complete psychotic breakdown. He had gone to the police early in the morning, and told them that I was being held against my will at a house in town, that I was a hostage. He gave them an address and described the house. This had to be around 5 AM, since they were at my friend’s house at 6. The police sent him home and went to check it out, thinking they had a serious situation on their hands. They woke up the poor guy, and probably everyone else who lived in the house right after, to see if I was in the house. I feel so bad that happened to those people. I can’t imagine how freaked out they are.

I know where the house is. But I have no idea who lives there, and I doubt he does either. It’s on a street where two of my friends used to live, both have moved. It’s a nice upper middle class neighborhood, and the house he chose was a log cabin. He had the exact address, which only makes me think he had to be scouting the neighborhood trying to figure out which house I was held in.

He told the police that he’d called my bff that morning, to see if she knew where I was and that she didn’t know.

When the police got to her house they asked her if she knew my ex. Of course, she’s known him 20 years. Then they asked her when was the last time she talked to him. She said, “At least 10 years ago.” They asked if she knew my whereabouts and she told them I lived here, and as far as she knew that’s where I was. They said are you sure, and she said, “well, I haven’t talked to her in a couple days, but Ill check FB and see if she’s posted anything about being up here.” Which of course I hadn’t because I was home in Florida.

They got on the phone with me and verified that I was me, and that I was safely in Florida. They asked a lot of questions about him, and I told them about the very crazy and weird conversations I’d had with him over the last couple weeks. Particularly, the one in which he asked me if my son was in the car with me and if we were heading to his place with “Mike”, and I’d had no idea what he was talking about.

After about 10 minutes, they told me they were going to go back to his house and call an ambulance and have him taken to the psych ward at the hospital. Which they did, and that’s where he is now.

My friend called me back after they left. She works at the state mental hospital in their dental clinic and is very informed about mental illness, and was able to calm me down somewhat. She told me to call my sister-in-law, because she is really next of kin. Although, I still think that if he had to give a number to call he probably gave them my name and number, because I think he still thinks we are married on some level.

But you know how it is when something of this magnitude comes barreling into your life. You try to absorb the information, and it expands and grows, as you realize what’s happened.

He called me from the hospital. I knew the exchange of the number was from that town and thought it might be the hospital. It was him. He sounded scared, and ready to cry, and said, “I just wanted to make sure you made it back to Florida ok.” And I said as quietly and calmly as I could, “I never left Florida. I’m here, and I’m fine.” He said, “Ok, thanks…” I’m assuming that he was getting agitated and aggressive in the hospital because he still believed I was in danger, so they let him call me to reassure him I was ok.

That call made me so sad for him. And somewhat guilty, that I was his only thread to sanity, and I’d failed him. (Though that’s not a role I kept, it just crossed my mind at the time.) I was ready to cry, I was crying I’m pretty sure. But I knew I needed to call my sister-in-law. I took a few minutes to catch my breath, but plugged on, and called her. I reached her husband, after leaving a voice mail on her cell, and told him what was up. Then she called me back.

They were not surprised, though they were shocked. Does that make sense? On one hand, my sister-in-law said, “I’ve always known if the police showed up at my door it would be about my brother, that there was always going to be a tragic ending with him.” On the other hand, the actual break, and the detail to which he built this delusion was shocking to any sane person, especially those who really knew him.

We all agreed that I needed to get in touch with the hospital, and give them information on previous, kind of psychotic episodes he’s had over the years, all of which I always wrote off to his alcoholism. He was always prone to believing someone was out to get him, when things went wrong, but he usually snapped out of it. Maybe that’s because I was there to explain to him what happened, and he hadn’t been isolated for 10 years. I don’t know. We also all agreed that we would stress to the drs how important it was that they didn’t let him out. That if they gave him meds and a dr. appointment he would not take the meds and would not keep a dr. appointment. And that he would be a definite danger to himself and others. My in-laws are worried that he might show up at their door, because he is stuck in the past in a big way, and she lives in the house he grew up in. He may wander up there looking for his parents, if he isn’t under treatment. And he’s so capable, when he’s not delusional, of selling snow to the eskimos.

I am so grateful that he went to the police, and didn’t show up at the guys house where he believed I was with his 12 gage. Just so unbelievably grateful for that.

Anyway, throughout the day, I talked at length to a psychiatrist at the hospital., to family, to friends, trying to re-center myself. And they called back, too, checking on me. But the hardest call was to my son, to tell him. It still makes me cry, to think he has to deal with a father who is this sick. He doesn’t deal with him first hand, but to there are so many layers of trauma for him with his dad, God, I did not want to add one more horrible one. But he had a right to know. We talked through it, he wondered if he was responsible because he would not talk to his father. I told him that he did with his father what he had to do to survive, and that I was ever so grateful that he hadn’t spent the last 7 years trying to understand or rationalize the crazy things his father says and does. For all my wishing that he had a relationship with his dad, I am so grateful now that he cut that toxicity out of his life, and stood strong and followed his heart. We’ve talked , and we talk every day. He’s going to be fine, though his head is still spinning, and I know this will have to be an ongoing conversations between us.

I had a good friend yesterday who suggested I see a therapist, and I think I will call my dr today and get a referral. In talking to my sister-in-law yesterday, I found out my niece, my godchild, has cancer and is undergoing radiation treatments, and will need surgery when that is over. This news was pretty new, and she hadn’t told many people yet. They’d just been trying to deal with it personally. Another close friend of mine told me her husband, who is also a close friend, was an undiagnosed diabetic, and got an infection in his toe that got in his bone, and made him so sick that they had to amputate his toe. So…the bad news just kept coming, and I felt so bad I hadn’t known, hadn’t been in close enough touch to support them.

I spent a lot of time crying yesterday. All of this trauma was exacerbated by the fact that I found something out Saturday night, before any of this, about someone I cared about that turned my head around, and gave me an entirely new view of that person. A view I didn’t like, at all. A view I don’t want in my life. It was unacceptable to me, on an extremely deep and personal level, and that friendship is over. It took all day yesterday when I wasn’t dealing with the other stuff, to end it. The other person kept contacting me insisting I deal with it, and I kept saying let me be today, I have some other real issues to deal with but they couldn’t let it go. I didn’t want to block them, I just wanted some space to deal with the real issues at hand. In the afternoon, I dealt with it, angrily, because of the selfish and self-centeredness on this friend’s part not to even ask or listen to me about the problems I was trying to deal with. I was on an emotional precipice and so when I dealt with it, it was without much grace, but with a lot of honesty, and bluntness. The fact that it was pushed on me to deal with it at such a time just made me want to end the friendship more. There are things you can accept in your life, and things you can’t, and there were multiple things that came to light that I just could not accept having in my life, aside from the unbelievably selfish way I was forced to pay attention to the other person, with absolutely no care or concern for what I was going through. I did receive an apology, but not until I was so angry I never wanted to talk to him again. It’s done, and I’m ok. It needed to be over and end in a way that there was nothing left.

That was not the worst thing that happened by far. It was, actually a blessing, to find it out now, and not later and not to invest any more time or energy into a friendship that was completely not what I thought it was. I’m really ok with it.

Those were the pieces I left on the ground, when my world shook out yesterday. I was so exhausted that I had no problem falling asleep last night.

I hope that yesterday was one of those days when it looked like everything was falling apart, but it was really falling together. Time will tell. I know there will be some hard times ahead. I also know there will be blessings to come out of all this, that the universe will take care of us all somehow, if we just let it. Today I’ll call the psychiatrist back, and give her more information, and, try to emphasize again, how much his family does not want him released to the public. I’ll find a therapist for myself. Then I may go sit on a beach somewhere and listen to the waves break on the shore.

Love and light, and if you made it til the end of this, I thank you for reading it.